Seminar: Environmental chemistry | May 10 | 10.30 a.m.-11.30 a.m. | Room 8.2.39 (FCUL C8)
Joanna Dołżonek, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Analysis, Faculty of Chemistry, University of Gdańsk, Poland
Ionic liquids as potential pollutants – are they real threat to the environment?
Host: Ana Paula Paiva
Ionic liquids (ILs) are purely ionic compounds. They have been hailed as designer solvents, since enormous number of cation and anion combinations is possible. Great advantage of that is the possibility of producing more environmentally benign solvents. However, some of already existing ILs exhibit significant toxicity and persistence, making them potentially hazardous substances. Nevertheless, interest in ILs by industry is still growing and more and more ILs are produced or imported in the amount higher than 10 tonnes per year. This creates requirements of evaluation toxicity, persistence and bioaccumulation potential under REACH regulation. As long as toxicity and persistence of ILs is quite thoroughly understood, little is known about their accumulation potential in living organisms. The bioaccumulation assessment of anthropogenic chemical substances using living organism (in vivo), due to very high costs, significant time and labour intensity, as well as ethical concerns, needs to be replaced by alternative methods. Therefore, the aim of the seminar will be presenting the problem of potential environmental pollutants using ionic liquids as an example, the hazards that can result from their presence in the environment and assessing the potential for long-term effects of their presence in the environment. The phenomenon of bioaccumulation will be discussed in detail. Classical methods for assessing bioaccumulation will be presented, as well as new alternative in vitro methods for assessing accumulation in living organisms will be discussed.